Hi. I have a headache.
02 Aug 2001Hi. I have a headache.
Well, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the prospect of setting up a home studio in a house, presumably that we’ll be renting (since I can’t afford to buy a house just yet).
I want to do this for our own use, first and foremost, but it occurred to me that it seems like it wouldn’t take much more work to get something set up on a more professional level that i could charge people to use.
I spoke with my dad about it, and he said it was a good idea and easy to do, but that I should avoid using my PC like the plague – because people won’t touch PC-based recording with a ten-foot pole. If it’s not a mac with protools, people don’t want anything to do with it.
However, after giving it some thought, I’m pretty well convinced that this is not deserved.. Once upon a time, a mac was infinitely more stable and efficient than a PC when it came to recording. You put windows98 on a mediocre PC with IDE drives and act surprised when everything crashes? Well, no shit, sherlock!
I’ve been using Windows2000 now for quite some time, despite people recommending win98 for audio stuff. Sure, windoews 98 is faster, but at what cost? Windows98 is so unstable it’s virtually unusable half the time, whereas I have never (amazingly) had Win2k crash hard on me.
As for speed, well – hardware is cheap. I’ve got an athlon thunderbird 900, now – and the cost for me to upgrade to an SMP machine (which win2k supports, and helps tremendously in audio processing) would be fairly minimal. I am using ultra2-LVD SCSI drives (that’s 80M/s between drives, which is way faster than ATA-100 or whatever most modern macs or stock PCs use). Not to mention that with a few more drives I could easily set up RAID striping to get redundancy .. It would take a catastrophic failure for me to lose any data.
As for ADAT? No thanks – I have a CD burner.
I’m not convinced the anti-PC bias is entirely deserved anymore. A mac with protools is a very powerful tool that can be used by a novice. However, the same novice would probably set up a PC for recording and have it work horribly. I’m not a novice, though, and I think I can do everything a mac with protools can do, and do it better.
But anyways, back to the point. How cool would it be to have a nice studio set up in the basement of a house? I basically only need a high-quality soundcard. After that, it would basically just be good, shielded cables, a few more mics here and there, and then soundproofing..
If I got a Delta 44(which is around $200 these days), I’d have 4 simultaneous inputs, which is nice, but how great would it be to have a Delta-1010, which is 8 inputs.. We could concievably have all our gear set up for recording – all the time. If we were practicing and and did something we liked, why, i could just sidle over to my computer and punch the record button and we’ve got a high quality digital recording of it.
Anyways, it’s partially just pipe dreaming, but I’d like to investigate the plausibility of it. A delta1010 is like $1000.. I might buy a delta 44 and build the studio around that and then upgrade some day..